Allentown and Bethlehem

Dad and I travel to the Lehigh Valley to visit the industrial centers of Allentown and Bethlehem. We begin with the Allentown Art Museum, have lunch in Bethlehem at Café the Lodge, and then visit the National Museum of Industrial History on the site of a former steel-producing powerhouse.

A light mist sprayed over our path from Reading to Allentown, Pennsylvania. We had selected a route with small highways and rural roads, full of pastoral scenes of grain siloes, white picket fences, and ever-present fields of corn. It was in stark contrast to our destination, a place known for iron, steel, and coal; for factories, mills, and heavy industry.

Allentown is the third-largest city in Pennsylvania, behind only Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The area was originally deeded to the sons of William Penn by 23 Native American chiefs representing five tribes in return for clothing, rum, pipes, knives, scissors, combs, and other household items. Allentown was a hotbed of early resistance to British rule and was the hidden home of the Liberty Bell when it was spirited away from Philadelphia during a British attack in 1777.

The city was already a hub of commerce and industrialization — with woolen mills, flour mills, sawmills, gunsmiths, and more — when iron ore beds were discovered in the surrounding hills. Furnaces sprung up to convert the ore to pig iron, a key component in steel manufacturing, spurring a huge boom in production. Allentown flourished in the industrial era, pivoting over generations to support new products like rayon and transistors. Even today, every Mack truck begins assembly here, a tradition that has lasted nearly 120 years.

Foreign industrial competition led to a decades-long decline in Allentown, as with so many other cities along the nation’s “Rust Belt.” As formerly high-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared, residents moved away from the factories to the suburbs. The city needed to rethink its investments and begin to modernize, a process that is still very much underway. One sign of hope: Allentown (along with Reading, Scranton, and Harrisburg) was listed as one of the top five places to retire in a 2024 study by U.S. News and World Report.

*Paulina Quintanajornet,* Blooming, *2022*

Allentown Art Museum

Dad and I made our first stop at the Allentown Art Museum, featuring a wide-ranging collection of European Renaissance and Baroque paintings, American paintings and sculptures from three centuries, Southeast Asian sculpture, international textiles, decorative arts, and a library designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frans Hals, *Portrait of (Retrato de) Cornelis Coning,* 1630

Hendrik van Vliet, *New Church in Delft, with Tomb of William the Silent,* c. 1660

The museum was running a special exhibition celebrating “fashion as experiment” in the 1960s, with wild womenswear displayed atop flower-petal stages, like the set of The Dating Game (ask your grandparents, kids).

Bethlehem

We would return to Allentown for our night's ballgame at Coca-Cola Park with the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. We wanted to see more of the Lehigh Valley, so we drove east along the Lehigh River for about six miles to the south side of Bethlehem, aka “Christmas City USA.”

The title has merit. Moravian Church members originally settled the town in 1741, and that Christmas Eve it was christened Bethlehem by a Moravian bishop. Six years later, Bethlehem became the first U.S. city to decorate a Christmas tree. In 1937, still in the throes of the Great Depression, the city officially adopted the nickname “Christmas City USA” to help promote commerce.

But this should not paint a bucolic picture of modern Bethlehem. Like its neighbor upriver, Bethlehem was a critical center of industry in the 20th century and was home of Bethlehem Steel, one of the largest steel-producing and shipbuilding companies in the world.

Dad and I stopped at Café the Lodge for lunch. On its side was a mural called Calma by Chilean artist Paulina Quintanajornet, whose work we had seen earlier in Allentown. Quintanajornet described this piece: “When you find beauty in patience you learn to dance with time — and after the storm cleared she was ready to meet the next version of herself.”

Café the Lodge has a good selection of sandwiches, soups, salads, paninis, and the like. What makes it stand out is that it employs workers who have mental health diagnoses — a barrier to most employment — as a way to help them integrate with the community. The restaurant displays a wall of artwork by “Artists in Recovery” who use their art as therapy for mental health issues such as anxiety or depression.

National Museum of Industrial History

We drove a few blocks closer to the Lehigh River to the National Museum of Industrial History, a Smithsonian-affiliated museum housed in the former electrical repair shop of Bethlehem Steel. It is one of hundreds of structures that once spanned four and a half miles along the river. Located in the shadow of 20-story-tall blast furnaces known locally as the SteelStacks, the museum celebrates steel-making and the industrial equipment and engines it enables.

Bethlehem Steel was founded as Bethlehem Iron Company before the Civil War. In 1873, it began making Bessemer steel — much more durable than iron — for the nation’s burgeoning railroad industry. Early in the 20th century, it became the largest steel provider to the construction industry, feeding the demand for bridges and skyscrapers in growing American cities. Bethlehem Steel also played a crucial role in both world wars, providing armor plating and ordnance. “We wouldn't have won World War I and World War II without it," historian Lance Metz told The Washington Post in 2003.

We passed a dizzying array of engines performing cleverly constructed, single-minded tasks. The museum’s path then led through exhibits on silk-weaving, steel-making, and the process of distilling propane — pioneered by Allentown chemist Walter O. Snelling.

After a day learning about pig iron, we were ready to check out the IronPigs.

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